Page 74 of She Who Devours the Stars
I closed my eyes, and for the first time in years, I felt more alive than afraid.
I knew, then, that I was doomed.
But being consumed by Fern would be glorious.
Chapter 10: Contest of Resonance
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane
Axis Alignment: South Tower
I woke to 44,000 unread notifications, a drone parked at my window with a live scroll of “HOTTEST NULLARCH MOMENTS: #27 WILL INCINERATE YOU,” and a meme of my face photoshopped onto a retro swimsuit model, captioned: “IS IT CANON IF SHE MAKES YOU TRANSCEND?”
It was not my best morning.
The problem with being the living containment field for an interstellar myth is that, apparently, you never get a day off. Not even on the first morning of “school.”
I staggered to the glass, still towel-wrapped from the bath, and flicked the drone’s visor. It bleeped, rerouted its lens, and started the feed over from the beginning. I caught a glimpse of my own expression—hair in chaos, eye bags trending on two planets, one shoulder still sparkling from Dyris’s idea of “bedtime moisturizer.” They’d looped the last ten seconds of me staring at the bath’s ceiling, stitched my voice into the soundtrack (“only in ambiance”), then set it to music usually reserved for product launches or suicide cult recruitment.
The HoloNet had no shame.
Behind me, my room buzzed to life. Every surface lit up: the smart mirror, the autodresser, the myth-fridge (which had decided my breakfast would be “taco salad in a cup,” a punishment for crimes I hadn’t committed yet), and the wall-sized news crawl, which immediately slammed me with the headline:
NULLARCH: REINCARNATION OR REGURGITATION? WAS LIOREN EVER REAL?
Below that, two warring docuseries promos fought for bandwidth. The first, “Lioren: Ghost in the Shellcode,” was narrated by an influencer with hair the color of overripe corn and a voice so breathless it sounded like she’d been tased. The preview cut between ancient, heavily-redacted footage of the Trivane wars (all fire and weeping and someone’s foot in a wine glass) and modern shots of me, usually eating, always in the worst possible lighting.
The second promo, from “TruthBehind,” featured a rogue mythographer pacing a stage made of literal old books, arms covered in illegal tattoos, arguing that I was both Lioren and a “forgotten cosmic hunger deity” spliced together by some Accord mythopolitician as a last-ditch entropy buffer. The bit they chose for the trailer was:
“Observe the appetite, the anomalous affect, the impossible eyes. This is not a child. This is a disaster wearing lipstick and trauma as a shell.”
They played it three times, each cut zooming closer, until it was just a hyper-grainy video of me staring back at the audience, bite of pizza halfway to my mouth, looking—honestly—like the last living animal on a doomed world.
I snorted so hard I inhaled pico-glitter. The drone loved it.
In a little inset in the upper left, the “official” Accord report tried to refute the madness. Instead, it just made it worse. “We have no evidence that the Nullarch is a synthetic being,” said the Accord’s Science Officer, a pale woman who looked like her last organic meal was “before the fall.” “Her genetic material is unremarkable.”
Which immediately triggered a planetary trending conspiracy: Nullarch was a Deep Black AI project. The proof? “Look at her cheekbones. Nothing in nature is that symmetrical except a weapon.”
I checked the mirror, turned my head left, then right. They had a point. I’d been called “weaponized” before, but never by someone who was definitely a bored wagebot looking for a raise.
Another feed scrolled in, this one with actual schoolchildren lined up on a classroom stage, chanting “NULLARCH NULLARCH NULLARCH” while a teacher—smiling, obviously dead inside—presented a taco to a cardboard effigy of me. The caption: “New curriculum approved. She saved us all from Flavor Collapse. We thank Her for the Return.”
They had adopted my taco moment as the “Founding Miracle of the Flavor Cycle.” Textbook publishers had already formatted a new section in the galaxy’s history syllabus. “The Nullarch eats, and thus we eat. Blessed be the Carnitas.”
The entire segment lasted thirty seconds before the drone segued to the next viral, which was just Alyx’s voice, trembling, from that pizza night: “she licked her lips,” looped so it became almost a prayer. Then they deepfaked the clip with a pulsing pink laser heart every time the words played. I watched it twelve times before I started to hallucinate a taste I couldn’t name.
A moment’s mercy, then the feed cut to an advert: “FROM MELDIN TO TRIVANE,” the new fashion line. All asymmetricalspa gowns, heat-reactive tattoos, edible body glitter, and a kind of false modesty that exposed more than it covered. They’d even digitized my actual bathrobe from the day before and were selling it as “Genuine Sovereign Replica: She Wore It, So Can You.”
The model in the spot looked better than me. I hated her with a passion usually reserved for elevator music or parental disappointment.
By now, my wall screen had given up and was just cycling headlines like it was shuffling a deck of disasters. “Eventide Shaken by Nullarch Memequake.” “Accord Parliament in Emergency Session After New Religion Hits Quorum.” “Can Our Children Survive the Next Flavor War?”
I turned away. The myth-fridge had sensed my mood and replaced the taco salad with a bottle of “synthetic tears, lightly salted.” I drained it in one go, then chucked the bottle at the drone. It caught the moment, replayed it in slow-motion, and then sent it to every person on the planet.
I’d lived my whole life in the corners. The places where you could watch the show, but never risk being the joke. Now, I was the joke. The meme, the religion, the trending topic with its own bootleg pop-up restaurant chain (“NULLARCHITOS: We’ll Make You Devour”).
I wanted to laugh, or scream, or both. But I just showered off the leftover spa glitter, threw on my least criminal set of pants, and let the autodresser pin a jacket to my frame that was almost—but not quite—impossible to wear.
